James Joyce’s Odyssey

The labors of “Ulysses.”

The Dublin poet Austin Clarke said that Joyce was afflicted “with a particular kind of Irish pornography.”

Illustration by Tullio Pericoli

At the age of twenty, as the impecunious James Joyce prepared to leave Dublin in order “to forge the conscience of his race,” he wrote blisteringly to Lady Gregory, the doyenne of Irish literary society, “I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.” That faith has since been vindicated, but his insistence that he did not want to be a “literary Jesus Christ” was sorely tried. Joyce’s journey as a writer was one of martyrdom: the odium meted out to each of his works was strenuous, but it was “Ulysses” that met with the most vituperative attacks. It was seen as technically monstrous, antihumanist, unclean, and excrementous. The doings, the sayings, the veniality, the music, the cadences of his Dubliners are all there, as is the city itself, but his real crime in that strife of tongues was to break the sexual taboos of holy Ireland, Victorian England, and puritanical America.

What would Joyce, the prevaricator, make of the revels that are held each year on June 16th, in commemoration of his miscreant hero Leopold Bloom? On Bloomsday in Dublin, men and women in Edwardian dress recite snatches of “Ulysses.” Bloom’s favorite foods—kidneys and other innards of beasts—are served at several rival breakfasts with, of course, Guinness, the national drink. More than other Irish literary icons, Joyce continues to command such revels because his work—particularly “Ulysses”—is a minefield of new riches, new explosives, each time we return to it. The Joyce I loved and learned from formerly has metamorphosed into an even more radical, more elusive, more labyrinthine writer than when I first read him or later read Richard Ellmann’s great biography of him. If the seven stages of man, as defined by Shakespeare’s melancholy Jaques, pertain, then Joyce is the author to conduct each one of us through our successive reading lives.

Joyce left Ireland—that “scullery maid of Christendom”—in 1904, to escape its confiningness, and went with his sweetheart, Nora Barnacle, to teach in a Berlitz school on the Adriatic coast, first in Pola, and then in Trieste. Being of a restless disposition, he soon tired of Trieste, with its drab provincials and a bora wind that turned men with ruddy complexions, like his, into butter. Rome, the Eternal City, suited his destiny, and, moreover, his hero Ibsen had wintered there. He found a job in a bank writing letters to foreign customers for nine hours a day.

In truth, anger over his financial straits and frustration at not having his short stories published was hotting up in him as he searched for that “fermented ink” to stir his bile, the way shots of absinthe sizzled his brain. It was in Rome, in 1906, that he first conceived of “Ulysses”—“that little epic of the Irish and Hebrew races.” From there, he voiced his literary manifesto in a postcard to his brother, Stanislaus. He wrote that if he were to put a bucket down into his own soul’s sexual department he would haul up the muddied waters of Arthur Griffith, the leader of Sinn Fein; Shelley; Ibsen; St. Aloysius; and Renan, the biographer of Christ. In short, cerebral sexuality and bodily fervor were universal: there was no such thing as a pure man or a pure woman. Joyce was about to do through words what Freud, whom he reviled, was attempting to do with highly strung patients in a cultivated but stifling Vienna.

He did not actually start writing “Ulysses” for eight more years, and by then he was living in Zurich, to which he and Nora had moved to escape the war. True to his talismanic inclinations, he liked to remind himself that, at the age of thirty-six, he was roughly as old as Dante had been when he began his “Divine Comedy,” and the age Shakespeare had been when he was struck by the Dark Lady of the sonnets. But his principal model would be Homer—blind Homer, precursor to blind Joyce, who, after laboring the seven years it took to complete “Ulysses,” was to suffer from glaucoma, cataracts, and dissolution of the retina. Nothing foreshadowed the transformation that was taking place within him. “Dubliners” had had a rending tenderness, and “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” was full of aesthetic self-questioning, but “Ulysses” would be seismic.

To make the book accurate to Dublin life required help from friends and relatives. It did not occur to Joyce that the pious ones, including members of his family, would recoil from his obscenities or that the literati who had been his drinking friends in his medical-school days would envy him the altitude to which his genius would go. One such friend was Oliver Gogarty, who, in an article published in the Saturday Review of Literature, in 1941, reminisced about Joyce with a sickening sanctimoniousness that did little to conceal his envy, and rued the fact that, in writing “Ulysses,” Joyce had lost the keys to his inferno. Joyce hadn’t lost anything: he merely wanted to insure that every detail, every feature of the Dublin he had left and would never live in again, was flawlessly and matchlessly rendered.

He would need to know the kind of pianola in Bella Cohen’s brothel, the kind of lamp that Stephen Dedalus would smash with his ashplant when the ghost of his dead mother appeared, and the pretty music-hall airs that might be played. (“My Girl’s a Yorkshire Lass” was what he decided on.) And Homer: he was always returning to Homer. He was intrigued by Hermes’ gift of a moly flower to Ulysses, to protect the traveller from Circe’s wiles. This moly flower—a white flower with a black root which was said to have magic propensities—was “a hard nut to crack,” he wrote to his friend Frank Budgen. It led to a train of questions. Would it be an invisible influence against accident? If so, what accident might that be? Syphilis, he thought, but then he wondered if the etymology of syphilis was “swine love” or “synphileis”—the conjoining of humans. And could the moly also be absinthe, which made men impotent—the juice of chastity, the blessed potion against contracting syphilis? He corresponded with the Baroness St. Leger, “a siren of the Lago Maggiore,” and she assured him that the moly was the garlic flower. He chose Hermes, the god of signposts, to shepherd Leopold Bloom in his traversal of the city in the course of a single day, before he returned home late at night to his sexually robust wife, Molly. Greece and Dublin, the ancient and the modern, coalesced into one.

Joyce was equipped with rhyming dictionaries, maps, street directories, Gilbert’s “Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland.” He badgered his friends for precise information on this or that—a list of shops, awnings, the steps leading down to 7 Eccles Street. He asked his faithful Aunt Josephine to get a page of foolscap and scribble down any “Goddamn drivel” that came into her head, and to find out whether, during the winter of 1893, the canals had been frozen hard enough for people to skate on. To Frank Budgen, he wrote, “Approach an ink bottle.” Budgen had been a sailor, and for Joyce, his experiences at sea—sea stories, sea slang, the sexual pangs of the sailors—had to be transferred into the mouths of aroused Dublin wanderers. After each exertion, he would collapse and repair to a bedroom—his eyesight worse than ever, Nora having to nurse him.

But Joyce’s powers of recuperation were great, and soon he would be up again, teaching, writing, visiting the taverns and the brothels—“the most interesting places in any city”—and, on occasion, bamboozling the landlord for a week’s or a month’s extension on the rent by playing a tune on his hire-purchase piano. Zurich was full of stimulation. Greeks, Poles, Germans, conscientious objectors, artists, chancers, and spies had all convened in the same city, and many of them frequented the Pfauen Café, where Joyce himself drank and overheard their crackpot theories of Futurism, Cubism, and Dadaism.

His listeners must have been enthralled by this lank, sandy-haired Irishman, with the near boneless handshake and the supple wit, who questioned each about what he knew best. He copied their slang and their anecdotes onto slips of paper, which he consigned to his pockets. He spoke five languages and had as well a smattering of Greek, though not the classical language. Greeks were good luck, nuns ill luck. He would have to know if the pigeons that flew between Scylla and Charybdis bore a resemblance to the Dublin ones, and he welcomed, even from strangers, anatomical descriptions of the Sirens in their coral caves, poised to ravish the sailors. He carried a pair of miniature drawers that he would put two fingers into and dangle puppet-like on the counter table, to the amusement of the motley clientele. He copied down French songs, and he especially liked the scatological ones. The Dublin poet Austin Clarke said, years later, that Joyce was afflicted “with a particular kind of Irish pornography,” but that he was also a dreamer. Dreamer and dredger, gerund purveyor and ultimate wordsmith, he would lope his way home from the bar, dancing capriciously in his cups, reciting Verlaine, and yet be ready for the next day’s excruciating work, to embody the jokes, the smut, the ditties, the flotsam and jetsam of all that he had heard, so as to make his book more commodious—more nearly universal. For a lesser writer, such dissipations would have been ruinous, but he wanted to experience everything in order to write it. It was not simply that. He would astound his readers. He would bring them to a pitch of consciousness where they had not gone before. Not for him the leisureliness of Marcel Proust, of whose masterpiece he said, “Analytic still life. Reader knows end of sentence before him.”

With Frank Budgen, in Zurich, the revels got heady. The two men stayed out late, still later, Joyce insisting when the bar closed that they be admitted to an upstairs parlor, and in the small hours, when they did make their way home, Joyce, with his straw hat and cane, performing his Isadora Duncan impersonation, a matter of whirling arms, high-kicking legs, and grimaces, which Budgen likened to the ritual antics of a comic religion. They laughed a lot, awakened the neighbors, and arrived home as Bloom and Stephen do in the “Ithaca” section of “Ulysses”—“brothers to the stars at which they gazed.” Unfortunately, they returned to an irate Nora Barnacle, shouting out the window and demanding that these revels stop. They didn’t. Nothing could dampen Joyce’s abundance of spirit and laughter during his richest and most prodigious years. In one of these night flarings, Nora told him that she had torn up his manuscript, and it sobered him enough to ransack the apartment and find it. The book “ist ein Schwein,” she said.

Carousing was only part of the stew. As Joyce hurried from one tuition job to the next, or from one creditor to another, he seemed, as his friend the novelist Italo Svevo noted, “locked in the inner isolation of his being.” When Joyce wasn’t teaching, he was in a bedroom, suitcase lid on his lap as a desk, bringing to life streets, shops, awnings, sayings, the “druid silence” of the sea, and the sweethearts on St. Stephen’s Green, their shadows coupling. Photographs of Nora with her growing children show us a less jaunty, far more solemn woman, with an unreadiness to smile. She was homesick, without wanting to go home. To a maid, she would talk on about Ireland and how quick the clothes dried on the line there, but, as Joyce always said, she detested her race. She was becoming wife and mother and less and less “the blue mountain flower” he had eloped with. From time to time in his letters home, he would refer to her nerves or her nervous breakdown or her fears, as her hair dismayingly began to fall out.

But all was not gloom. He was gathering admirers and little windfalls of money, as chapters of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” began appearing in an English literary magazine. Ezra Pound placed Joyce above all living writers and, in 1917, he took upon himself the stalwart task of getting “Portrait” published in England. After reading the manuscript, the writer Edward Garnett reported to Duckworth, the publisher, that the book was “discursive, formless, unrestrained, and [filled with] ugly things, ugly words.” When Pound read this, he suggested that Garnett be sent to the Serbian front, to take him out of harm’s way. Garnett’s remarks, Pound said, were typical of the venom and the envy that befoul literature, and as for asking James Joyce for alterations—which the publishers had suggested—it would be tantamount to “fitting the Venus de Milo into a pisspot.”

In Britain, Pound and Yeats secured for Joyce a grant of seventy-five pounds from the Royal Literary Fund. At the same time, Harriet Shaw Weaver, an English benefactress who had serialized “Portrait” in her magazine, The Egoist, was so touched by Joyce’s “piercing spirit” that she resolved to give him a secret allowance of fifty pounds from her capital for four months, and periodic gifts throughout his life. The next bounty was from a more worldly source—Edith Rockefeller McCormick, a devotee of Jung and a patron of the arts in Zurich, who was aware of Joyce’s burgeoning notoriety. She decided to bestow on Joyce a fellowship of twelve thousand francs a year (the equivalent, today, of a little more than seven thousand dollars) with a thousand to be paid each month. In order to collect his first monthly installment from the bank, Joyce had to borrow a black suit, and that night in the café it was double litres of white wine.

Except for Miss Weaver’s stipend, the gifts came with a price. Mrs. McCormick stopped her allowance one day and refused to meet with Joyce after she received one of his craven letters. As always, he believed that a friend—in this case, a student named Ottocaro Weiss—had betrayed him. Weiss, Joyce maintained, had probably told the good lady of his aversion to Jung, and Jung in turn had probably advised her to stop doling out the money in order to temper Joyce’s profligacy. It did not occur to him that Mrs. McCormick was as capricious as many another rich heiress.

There were times during the writing of the book when Joyce admitted to being “on the rocks.” Fragments that he had written were scattered in this place and that, and one letter to Svevo shows Joyce’s confounding mixture of chaos and particularity. He wrote from Paris that in his brother-in-law’s apartment in Trieste there was an oilcloth briefcase fastened with a rubber band which had the color of a nun’s belly, approximately ninety-five by seventy centimetres, which he was in urgent need of to finish the “bitch-of-a-mother” book. “Ulysses” was written in three cities—first in Zurich, then in Trieste, to which Joyce returned after the war, and finally in Paris, where he finished the book.

“Ulysses” is a quintessence of consecration and desecration, at once serious and comical, hermetic and skittish, full of consequence and inconsequence, sounds and silences, lappings and anapests, horse hooves and oxen thuds, and a motley crew of Dubliners on June 16, 1904—in acknowledgment of the date on which Joyce began his courtship of Nora. It was “an uninterrupted unrolling” of thought and feeling—a method that Joyce had first come across in Edouard Dujardin’s novel “We’ll to the Woods No More.” Joyce said that he was giving Dujardin “cake for bread.”

For all the vividness of Bloom and Molly, language is the book’s hero and heroine—language in constant fluxion, and with a dazzling virtuosity. All the standard notions about story, character, plot, and human polarizings are capsized. To each chapter Joyce gave a title, a scene, an hour, an organ, an art, a color, a symbol, and a technique, so that we are successively in tower, school, strand, house, bath, graveyard, newspaper office, tavern, library, street, concert room, second tavern, a lying-in hospital, a brothel, a house, and a big bed. The medley includes kidneys, genitals, heart, brain, ear, eye, womb, nerves, fat, and skeleton. The symbols vary from horse to tide, from nymph to Eucharist, from siren to virgin, from Fenian to whore, and on to Earth Mother. The technique ranges from narcissistic to gigantic, from tumescent to hallucinatory, and the styles are so variable that the book’s eighteen episodes could really be described as eighteen novels between the covers.

It is hard to imagine the astonishment felt by those who read it for the first time. Margaret Anderson, who serialized “Ulysses” in her New York literary magazine, The Little Review, admitted to having cried upon reading the first lines of the “Proteus” section, in which Stephen Dedalus, walking on Sandymount Beach, declares, “Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide.” From 1918 to 1920, Anderson published fourteen chapters of the work-in-progress in twenty-three issues. Trouble arose when copies containing what Joyce called a “marmalady” section of the book were confiscated by order of the United States Post Office and burned. For Joyce, the incident was a repetition of the vandalism of “Dubliners,” whose publication had been delayed for eight years by pusillanimous publishers. He told Miss Weaver that being “burned” twice on earth would insure him a quick passage through Purgatory.

In September, 1920, John Sumner, the secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, lodged a formal complaint, and Margaret Anderson and her co-editor, Jane Heap, were summoned to the Jefferson Market Courthouse, in Greenwich Village, before three judges and some fascinated New Yorkers. The lawyer John Qyinn, who had befriended Joyce, took up the defense of The Little Review. Joyce had always guessed that “Ulysses” would bring trouble. In the course of writing the book, he described it to Frank Budgen as a “namby pamby jammy marmalady drawersy (alto là!) style with effects of incense, mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, painter’s palette, chitchat, circumlocutions, etc., etc.”

Under the court’s scrutiny was “Nausicaa,” the thirteenth chapter of the novel and one of its most seductive ones. It centers on Gerty and her two girlfriends, Edy and Cissy, who have gone to the sea, to relax and discuss matters feminine. The words of the litany from the nearby Star of the Sea Church—“Tower of ivory, tower of gold,” those paeans to the Virgin Mary—intrude on Gerty’s erotic stirrings as her womanflower raises the spectre of a “manflower” in a gentleman not too far away. It is Leopold Bloom, eying her lasciviously, and very soon she realizes that she has “raised the devil in him.” Gerty, this veritable model of young Catholic girlhood, soon yields to the glances of the mysterious stranger. Under the brim of her chocolate straw hat, she sees a face worn but passionate, and, as the incense drifts out from the open window of the church, the pronouncements of the rosary become a little less mystical with each devouring glance.

How physically close Bloom and Gerty actually become we never learn. She swings her legs in and out and feels the warmth of her flesh against her stays as she gazes at fireworks from a nearby bazaar. While Roman candles burst in the sky, she leans far back to give the gentleman a view of her nainsook knickers. Trembling in every limb, Gerty would cry chokingly to welcome him into her snowy-white arms, but she daren’t. For him, it is not quite so ethereal. “Up like a rocket, down like a stick,” Bloom laments.

When the moment came for the offending passages to be read aloud at the trial, one of the judges asked Miss Anderson to be removed from the courtroom as an act of propriety. The two other judges found the material so incomprehensible that they asked for a week’s pause to collect their faculties and read the entire episode. When the proceedings resumed, Quinn contended that Gerty’s exhibition of her drawers was not nearly so flagrant as that of the display-window mannequins on Fifth Avenue. The prosecuting attorney became so apoplectic that Quinn cited his reaction as clear evidence that “Ulysses” did not fill people with sexual urges, it made them explode with anger. The judges laughed at this ruse, but the editors of The Little Review were nevertheless found guilty of publishing obscenity, fined fifty dollars each, and forbidden to print any more installments of “Ulysses.” Joyce countered by saying, “Obscenity occurs in the pages of life, too.” But New York publishers who had expressed interest in the novel were now fearful of prosecution, and he said despairingly, “My book will never come out.”

Yet for his art he always found what he wanted. Waiting in the wings was Sylvia Beach, a bright, eager young woman who had come from Baltimore and made a niche for herself in bohemian Paris with her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. Her shop was salon, post office, lending library, and impromptu bank for a clutch of American writers, but it was Joyce whom she most coveted for her literary galaxy.

The story has been told again and again: their fairy-tale encounter on July 11, 1920, as she came upon him at a party in his tennis shoes and an old jacket, standing aloof. She approached him and said, “Is this the great James Joyce?” To which he replied, “James Joyce.” In keeping with his ever superstitious nature, he was pleased to find her shop linked to Shakespeare’s name, and he took it to be a good omen. Not long after, she asked if he would pay her the honor of allowing her to publish “Ulysses.” Joyce was incredulous. For all his burgeoning notoriety, he was living in a flat with no electricity, no bathtub, and a few cracked plates, and here was a woman who was proposing to print—through an intellectual printer in Dijon named Maurice Darantière—a thousand copies, a hundred on Holland paper, a hundred and fifty on de-luxe paper, and the remaining seven hundred and fifty on linen. She would give the author sixty-six per cent of the net profits. Neither Miss Beach nor M. Darantière could have guessed the complications that lay ahead, because neither of them knew James Joyce. In his possession was only a carbon copy of “Ulysses,” which did not carry the changes he had made in the versions that had been published in serial form. Moreover, these corrections, which were written in his cramped, weblike handwriting, were almost illegible.

Typists were somehow procured—and lost—in this fever of work and revision. If Joyce, as he told Miss Weaver, was in a state of “energetic prostration,” so were his helpmates. Some of them were so shocked by the material that they dismissed themselves. Wherever Joyce went, there was chaos. He was still writing to friends to collect “bits” for his Dublin knaves and loiterers, and he was still finishing the last chapter, which he called his “most secret conception.”

His demands concerning paper, binding, and typeface were inflexible. He wanted the cobalt blue of the Greek flag on his cover, but locating the correct dye to reproduce that exact blue meant that Darantière had first to journey to Germany, and then submit samples to Joyce, and Joyce didn’t feel that the white lettering on blue had the magic impact of white islands on a blue archipelago of water.

Joyce insisted that Darantière send him five sets of page proofs. He constantly made changes on them, and the corrected pages were so scarred with stars and lineations that the beleaguered printer threatened to withdraw. Through it all, Sylvia Beach remained sanguine. The Greek flag fluttered outside her shop, alerting passersby to the great pending event. It was, of course, her halcyon time: a famous, virtually unread book was being published by her and was about to be exhibited in her shop. Meanwhile, Miss Beach was gathering subscribers—people who would place orders for the book. They included Hemingway, Churchill, André Gide, an Anglican bishop, and a few French intellectuals, but not George Bernard Shaw. He declined, adding that the book was a repulsive, if accurate, description of Ireland, and that he would like to force every Irish male between the ages of fifteen and thirty to read it, but that its list price of a hundred and fifty francs (one hundred and forty dollars) was exorbitant. He then indulged in a bit of chiding of Miss Beach, saying that she, no doubt as a young, beglamoured barbarian, assumed the book to be art, but that it was in fact no more than a slice of Dublin life.

In keeping with his superstitions, Joyce wanted “Ulysses” published on his fortieth birthday—February 2, 1922. Darantière managed to grant his wish, entrusting two copies of the book to the conductor of the Dijon-Paris express. Miss Beach met the train at seven in the morning and went directly to Joyce’s apartment to deliver her progeny. Joyce signed one copy to Nora, and she attempted, in her roguish way, to sell it to Arthur Power, a Dubliner who was visiting. The second copy was displayed in the window of Shakespeare and Company; and people came to look at it as they might at some religious phenomenon.

Joyce went to Miss Beach’s shop to learn about new subscribers, to wrap up the books for the post, and to provide wild and unrealistic plans for advertising it. As ever, he was alive to omens and slurs. If he saw a rat on the way, he fainted. The shop, Miss Beach later said, was completely at the service of James Joyce and his “Ulysses.” Arthur Power said that Sylvia Beach would have crucified herself for Joyce, as long as it was done in public. Once again, Harriet Weaver stepped in to help, arranging for copies to be sent to a host of reviewers, influential people, and libraries, including the Bodleian Library, in Oxford.

To the British critic John Middleton Murry, who praised the novel as the outpourings of a half-demented man of genius, Joyce wrote a cordial letter. He also wrote one to Arnold Bennett, who thought the “Penelope” episode a masterpiece. Joyce suggested to Miss Weaver that she give a nudge to T. S. Eliot to review it in the Times Literary Supplement—all the graceless musterings that a writer resorts to once the labor has been finished.

Joyce may, in passing, have called “Ulysses” a “tiresome book,” and even said that the money spent on a pound of chops would be just as wisely used, but he raged at the slightest criticism. Rebecca West wrote of Joyce’s “camouflaged sentimentality,” and Virginia Woolf called the book “underbred”—the effort of “a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.” One writer who did recognize Joyce’s genius was Yeats, who wrote to assure Joyce of his many admirers in Dublin.

What hurt Joyce most was the response of his family. Aunt Josephine, on whom he had so often called for data about this or that, expressed the sort of distaste that the Samsa family feels in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” upon finding that their son Gregor has been turned into a loathsome insect. When Josephine’s daughter, Kathleen, told Joyce that her mother had thought the book not fit to read, he replied that if “Ulysses” was not fit to read, life was not worth living. His father looked at passages through his monocle and said that his son was “a nice sort of blackguard.” Stanislaus’s praise was tepid—hardly surprising from a brother who believed in his symbiotic role in Joyce’s genius. The book, he said, “lacked serenity and warmth.” The unkindest cut came from Nora. She read only twenty-seven pages, which, as Joyce pointedly said, included the title page.

Legends began to spring up about Joyce as his name circulated even among those who had not read a word of “Ulysses.” He was a misanthrope, a cocaine addict, a spy for Austria during the war; the text was merely a code for British intelligence. He swam in the Seine every day, he surrounded himself with mirrors, he wore black gloves in bed, and so on. Nothing was said about the twenty thousand hours of labor that had gone into “Ulysses,” his arthritis, the suffusions in his eyes and in his brain, his having to use charcoal sticks and different-colored inks to see what he had written. He tested his failing sight by trying to count the number of lights on the Place de la Concorde when he went out in the evening.

Fame changed him. What he would say in his books he would conceal in his life. When a drinking companion said, “Here’s to sin,” Joyce countered, “I won’t drink to that.” He and Nora—no longer rabid lover—were now, as he put it, “beati innocenti.” Stanislaus, on a visit to Paris, found him “too pampered,” said he drank too much and played with words too much. Nora saw to it that his dress improved—a velvet smoking jacket with a silk cravat and, instead of an ashplant, a snakeskin-covered walking stick.

Joyce may have become grander and more remote, but he was not a recluse. Arthur Power recalled that he functioned best in a noisy place—he needed people around him. At social gatherings, buoyed with drink, he would remember the advice of a fellow-author, James Stephens: “Rejoice and be exceedingly bad.” He would sing his favorite song, “The Yellow and the Brown Ale.” He had learned a prettified version of it in the “Irish Homestead” as a youth but had searched for the more bawdy version, which dealt with woman’s waywardness and man’s cuckoldry. He sang beautifully, his voice charged with feeling, pausing on each note or so, and to his listeners it was “pure Irish, filled with tenderness, melancholy, and bitterness.” On these occasions, his stiffness and his shyness left him, but, as Archibald MacLeish once said, there was “something vivid and maybe dangerous underneath.”

Joseph Conrad, in a letter to a sorrowing aunt, wrote “how solitude loses its terrors once one fully knows it,” but for Joyce, solitude would have meant the madhouse. His fear of dogs and thunder are no secret; his fear of madness he both admitted and repudiated; but his fear of aloneness he kept to himself. His family—Nora and their two children—was a bulwark against it, and so was drink. The exile that had been first from his own country extended to an exile from all the rest of the world, and to endure it he had to have bustle around him. The visitors always gauged their behavior by his mood, his smile, or his non-smile. Nora would sit with the guests, not even offering them a drink until Joyce appeared, and his increasing blindness added to the sense of formality as he recognized his guests by their voices, then took his customary place, by the window. The first half hour was always somewhat sombre, with conversation so stilted that even Harriet Weaver was addressed formally. This was not simply grandeur; it was a man with a distance between himself and others.

Paradoxically, as writers wrestle with language to capture the human condition, they become callous, and cut off from the very human traits they so glisteningly depict. There can be no outer voice, no interruptions—only the inner drone, rhythmic, insistent, and struggling to make a living moment of both beauty and austerity. For Joyce, people were becoming more and more remote, and would eventually be spectres.

In 1922, Sylvia Beach wrote to tell him that by allowing a second edition to be published from the same plates she felt that she was in danger of being brought up before a French court for having palmed off a bogus first edition. Angry booksellers, angry publishers, and angry collectors were outraged that their first edition might not be unique. Adrienne Monnier, Miss Beach’s lover, later wrote to tell Joyce what she had for a long time been thinking—that Miss Beach, his “maid of all work,” was being exploited. She had been put upon, made to hustle. Shakespeare and Company had existed only for the benefit of James Joyce. Those who thought he was indifferent to fame and fortune were sadly mistaken, as she could assure them. True to Joyce’s dissembling nature, he did not enter the fray. He said that it was always best not to act for oneself but to cultivate ostensible aloofness and to pull strings.

“I am always friends with a person for a purpose,” he had said, and Miss Beach’s purpose was waning. He would replace her with another acolyte.

True to a long line of dauntless Englishwomen who have risked their lives and their respectability for a “cause,” Harriet Weaver found her cause in the person of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce. That she loved him was undoubted, and that the fact of it was never even broached is remarkable. Whenever she received a small pension from this or that deceased relative, she rushed to put it at his disposal. Whenever he voiced concern over worsening impecunity, she would cross the Channel to reassure him of her support. She saw him down bottle after bottle of wine, tip handsomely, and travel by taxi when she travelled by bus. But none of that did anything to disillusion her.

Various estimates have been made of how much Miss Weaver gave him, over the course of twenty-four years: one Joyce specialist, Robert Adams Day, has calculated that in the equivalent of today’s currency it was close to a million dollars. She asked for nothing in return. Her original intention was to give him the wherewithal to write, but soon her role extended to helping him with his living expenses, his wife’s living expenses, his children’s needs, their illnesses, his numerous eye operations, the hotels in Paris where he lived, and the more opulent hotels where he vacationed. As Joyce became more and more dependent on his benefactress, his need of money became more and more rapacious. His treasury, he wrote her, was being “sucked up by some giant vacuum,” which he omitted to call himself.

Miss Weaver would get something in return—the gift of seeing the wonder of Joyce’s imagination in full flight. As he began to write his next masterpiece, he sent her glossary after glossary of explanation, along with little nudges for her to delight in his word puzzles. “Wolken,” he explained, was a woollen cap of clouds; “dinn” was a mixture of “din” and the Arabic “djinn”; this from a mind whereupon the word “battlefield” would become “bluddle filth.”

One morning in March of 1923, despite upheavals, failing eyesight, and deteriorating health, Joyce took up some foolscap and commenced on his “Work in Progress.” The book’s title—“Finnegans Wake”—he jealously guarded, confiding it only to Nora, in case he died. “ ‘Ulysses’—who wrote it, I’ve forgotten,” he said. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the June 7, 1999, issue, with the headline “Joyce’s Odyssey.”

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